New Manure Biogas Plant Expected to be Generating Electricity by Month's End
CANADA - Farm-Scape: Episode 1480. Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.Farm-Scape is sponsored by
Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Play Audio Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork. |
Farm-Scape, Episode 1480
A new renewable energy and organic fertilizer production plant in Saskatchewan is expected to be generating electrical power by the end of this month.
The new biogas production plant was built by Clear-Green Environmental adjacent to a 12 hundred sow farrow to finish operation near Cudworth.
The plant uses anaerobic digesters to convert manure from the hog barn into biogas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, which will be sold to Sask Power to generate electricity.
Clear-Green Sales and Marketing Vice-President Clay Sparks says phase one, the energy phase, is complete and there should be energy on the grid by the middle to the end of this month.
"Our goal is to hit 65 to 70 percent methane and the rest would be carbon dioxide.
Right now we're sitting at about 35 percent methane.
We're well into our commissioning phase right now, where we started about two months ago when we filled the digester up with manure.
You get gas production right away but it's really high in carbon dioxide and low in methane until such point as the bacteria reaches the point where have a high methane and low carbon dioxide gas mixture.
When we're at 50-50 methane to carbon dioxide we will be able to have our gas burned in four 30 kilowatt microturbines to produce electricity.
There's also going to be heat that comes off those microturbines that comes back to our process to heat up fresh manure so it's sort of a loop on the heat.
In a second phase of the project we'll be adding further equipment that can extract out the fertilizer nutrients, the nitrogen, the phosphorus and the potassium.
We're going to be blending those down into a concentrated liquid organic fertilizer and selling those into niche markets".
Sparks says the generation of electricity by independent power producers isn't currently being done in Saskatchewan so this is something of a research project for Sask Power as well.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.